If the Ku Klux Klan ever really got its claws into a major American city, it probably was in Dallas in the early 1920s, when the group established a firm grip on local government. At one point, the sheriff, the police commissioner and top Democratic Party officials claimed membership. The State Fair of Texas hosted a Ku Klux Klan day, and people showed up in droves.

The experience shook the city’s business class and led to a campaign (championed by this newspaper) that saw the Klan driven back into the shadows where it belonged. From that frightening period emerged a plan to change the way Dallas was governed. Gone was the commissioner system. Instead, a professional manager would oversee Dallas, answering to a nonpartisan City Council and cushioned from the whims of the electorate.

Today, the Dallas City Council is seeking its 16th city manager. Making the right choice is the most important work the council will do. The city manager — a person unknown to many residents — has more power over the day-to-day functioning of Dallas than any other individual. More important, the manager has the ability to quietly shape the city for generations.

A powerful and adept manager will see her priorities become the priorities of the council and, ultimately, the taxpayer. Few better examples stand in Dallas today than the white arch of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. It was Mary Suhm’s dream to have Santiago Calatrava design bridges to span the Trinity River and create an iconic image of the city.

The City Council’s behavior might shape outsiders’ perceptions of City Hall. A bitter and dysfunctional council will have people saying the city’s a mess. But that’s a skewed understanding. It’s the manager’s personality that really shapes things. Is it a timid, caretaking government, or is it willing to embrace and test new ideas? Is City Hall a place of maneuvering and secrets or transparency and openness? The answers lie with the manager.

Suhm is among the longest-serving managers in Dallas’ history, and she will be remembered for steering the city in a better direction. The reawakening of downtown, the softening of the central city with parks, and the realization of the Arts District all occurred on her watch. But like city managers before her, her tenure was marked by accusations that entrenched interests came first at City Hall. Controversies over gas drilling and concessions at Love Field only strengthened the perception.

Dallas’ new manager must work to break down the sense that, behind closed doors, the city is picking winners and losers, especially when, too often, the winners are the powerful, the entrenched and the moneyed.

Changing the perception won’t be easy. The history of Dallas City Hall — the very reason for the creation of the government it has — all but ensures clashes between commercial and public interests. The men who brought the city manager system to Dallas saw great benefits in it. The council members were, after all, businessmen whom the new system freed from the daily affairs of City Hall. And the manager was a person trained and experienced in running Dallas the way the businessmen wanted it run — light regulation, low taxes and lots of expansion.

Historian Patricia Evridge Hill called the early and middle 20th century the “pure” stage of Dallas government. The manager’s role was fairly simple. Do the bidding of a City Council that worked in lock step for a bright commercial future. It was an “empire of consensus,” she wrote.

The system “promised a clean and orderly city within which business could thrive,” political scientist Royce Hanson wrote in Civic Culture and Urban Change: Governing Dallas.

There was a less-heralded benefit, too. The government became less personal. The manager had plenty of direct and indirect power. But he (it was always a man until 1990) had to be mindful of his masters. That wasn’t so hard. After all, the council was composed of like-minded businessmen. The system was tailored to respond to the influence of powerful interests first, the electorate second and minorities and the poor last, if at all. So long as the council was a homogenous collaboration of businessmen, the city would be a reflection of their visions. Usually, that vision focused on the expansion of commerce at the expense of the city’s evolution.

In her book Dallas: The Making of a Modern City, Hill captured the nature of the leadership.

“Most Dallas leaders remained remote, inaccessible, and at times almost anonymous,” she wrote. “The presence of a professional city manager — accountable to the City Council but not directly to the electorate — contributed to the ‘faceless’ nature of municipal government.”

It also contributed to the faceless nature of the city itself.

In 1969, writer Bud Shrake looked around Dallas, a city he had called home for six years, and didn’t care much for what he saw.

The so-called pure stage of Dallas government began to crumble in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the door at last cracked open for minorities like George Allen Sr. and Juanita Craft to serve on the City Council. Though some minority council members were at times co-opted, their presence forever changed city government and its management. They lacked the numbers to directly challenge the traditional sources of power, but they broke down the unanimity that prevailed for so long.

This made the city manager’s job more complex. There were distinct factions to be satisfied and coalesced and, sometimes, pitted against one another. “Race mattered in almost every situation that involved a major adjustment of resources or power,” Hanson wrote.

The racial divide was often bitter, and angry exchanges became commonplace at City Hall. In the 1980s, Diane Ragsdale and Al Lipscomb used their council seats more as a platform for social change than anything else. They organized marches, often targeting police abuse and what they saw as City Hall’s indifference to racial inequality. At one rally in 1988, attorney Peter Lesser described Ragsdale and Lipscomb as “the vanguard of the social revolution.”

The impact on the daily business at City Hall was obvious.

A story — probably apocryphal but still told around town — involves how Atlanta made the case that it would be a better host than Dallas for the 1996 Olympics. Its representatives showed the selection committee a tape of the Dallas City Council in action.

The collapse of the era of consensus was complete, and the city manager’s job changed along with City Hall. Charles Anderson, the city manager from 1981 through 1986, put a diplomatic spin on things.

“What’s happened is, the decision-making process takes more time, more skills and more patience, and the city manager must have more capacity for ambiguity and uncertainty,” Anderson said.

There was something more at play during these changing times. As Hanson notes, the manager’s job wasn’t only becoming more complex, it was evolving. When the old system of consensus broke down, the manager was no longer simply a neutral administrator. Instead, the manager became someone who engaged in “policy entrepreneurship and advocacy.” Anyone who has witnessed city staff’s work on the Trinity River Project or the push to open the city to gas drilling understands the shift.

If Anderson thought the job was difficult in his era, it is only becoming more so today.

Racial divisions on the City Council are more muted, though they remain a way of life — witness the fight over the effort to reform the municipal courts system. Of course, the old business interests still hold sway — embodied in Mayor Mike Rawlings, a former chief executive cut in the mold of the self-made Dallas man.

But something is different now.

The city is changing again, and the council is changing with it. There’s no certainty anymore that issues will divide simply along racial lines.

Call it the Angela Hunt syndrome. The former council member from the M Streets was quick to challenge staff when she believed Suhm was attempting to steer policy. Today, there is a collection of council members, led by Philip Kingston and Scott Griggs, who are openly suspicious of city management’s use of its power. Their political base is in neighborhoods, and they didn’t get the support of traditional business interests on their way into office. They are oppositional, but not in the way we’re used to witnessing opposition at City Hall — lots of noise and little impact. They represent interests that have struggled to find a voice at City Hall. They are protective of the city’s character and skeptical of the suburban-style “progress” that defined its growth for decades.

A recent debate over how to give city employees a raise shows how things have changed. Interim City Manager A.C. Gonzalez wanted merit raises, something he said promised that the best employees would get the most money. But council member Adam Medrano, in concert with Griggs and Kingston, pushed forward a plan for across-the-board raises, which they said would be fairer to all employees.

Underlying their argument was a claim that “merit” at City Hall doesn’t always mean you did the best job. It just means you’re in good stead with the bosses. They got unexpected support, from South Dallas council member Carolyn Davis to Lakewood representative Sheffie Kadane — normally a sure vote for management’s plans.

Ultimately, with the help of Rawlings, the merit raise plan won out. But the vote was close. It showed how unpredictable things could be with this new council and how skeptical some of its members are of the city manager’s priorities.

To be successful, a new manager is going to need to quickly grasp a lot of different nuances at play on the council. The person will not only have to be sensitive to the powers that be, but to the powers that are becoming. Dallas is maturing as a city. Its neighborhoods are becoming more distinct and aware. East Dallas can no longer lay claim to being the surest source of agitation at City Hall.

The future Dallas should be a city of strong urban neighborhoods with their own flavor and identity. The new manager should recognize and promote these distinctions, even at the expense of commercial interests eager to capitalize on the next hot spot. Decisions about infrastructure, among the most important decisions the manager can make, must support this vision.

The new manager must also be sensitive to Dallas’ history of racial inequality and the impact that has on so many of City Hall’s priorities. Whether it’s a real estate boom in West Dallas’ La Bajada neighborhood or the decision to make City Hall a partner in an exclusive golf club in southeast Dallas, the perceptions and reality of inequality are a problem. Rawlings’ great hope for the city, that it will “grow south,” must be balanced with an understanding of the needs and desires of communities that already exist south of the Trinity River.

Business remains the most potent force at City Hall and is in no danger of dismissal. Nor should it be. When Dallas was in its infancy, there was no certainty it would be more successful than any number of other cities getting started. It was the vision and drive of its business leaders that propelled Dallas forward as others stagnated. The imbalance of power may have lingered too long, and without sufficient transparency, in the hands of commercial interests. But the city Dallas becomes will rely in large part on the capital of its business leaders. A manager who fails to understand that will be shown the door sooner than later.

The growing number of competing interests makes the manager’s job that much more complicated. The new manager is going to have to be part diplomat, part politician, part peacemaker, and, yes, part manager to succeed.

Suhm did not always try to balance competing interests. She usually made a plan and pushed it forward until it became policy. But in her eight years, she constantly kept large numbers of council members on her side. She did it through force of personality and an extraordinary political sense. She had the gift to be both intractable and humble all at once. There was never a push to remove her. The vote wouldn’t have been close.

It will be hard for the new manager — whoever it is — to match that. It isn’t simply that Suhm was unusually adept at the job. It’s that the job has become harder. The city, and its council, has changed. And, all in all, that’s for the better.

Dallas Morning News writer Rudolph Bush has covered Dallas City Hall for six years and may be contacted at rbush@dallasnews.com.

About this series

A national search begins in October to find Dallas’ next city manager. This hire is probably the most consequential decision the mayor and City Council members will make during their time in office.

The Dallas Morning News wants to foster rich conversation around this hire. So as the candidate list is compiled — and then narrowed — between now and year’s end, we will publish a series of columns by stakeholders regarding what qualities in a city manager are most important to Dallas’ future and why.

These columns, which will kick off tomorrow with an essay by Mayor Mike Rawlings, will appear on the Viewpoints page.

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